Washington Post Columnist: Being a Sexual Assault Victim Is a "Coveted Status"

He also argues that colleges' definitions of sexual assault have gotten ridiculously broad.

Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist/troll George Will is the latest right-winger to put "rape culture" in scare quotes, having written an outrageously offensive column about how being a campus sexual assault victim is a "coveted status."

When Will recounts the sexual assault of a Swarthmore College student in 2013, he frames the anecdote by writing that the victim "was in her room with a guy with whom she'd been hooking up for three months." No matter that the woman clearly told the man, "No," and he continued anyway — since she'd consented before, that means she'd pretty much consented for all time, right? Isn't that how that works?

Will takes issue with the statistics at hand: One in five college women are sexually assaulted, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Choosing to blatantly ignore that the second statistic makes it quite clear that the vast majority of assaults go unreported, Will uses the 12 percent statistic to claim that the first statistic is actually 2.9 percent, not 20 percent. (According to RAINN, 60 percent of all sexual assaults are not reported to the police, and the CDC confirms that 19 percent of female college students have experienced attempted or completed sexual assault on campus.)

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Going to start with… does Will really not accept empirical fact that lots of survivors choose not to report? http://t.co/2qwrYw1Fgs

Will also criticizes the broadening classification of sexual assault, which sounds suspiciously like the ol' Todd Akin "legitimate rape" gaffe of yore. He argues that the increasingly "capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching." In other words, being on the receiving end of unsolicited groping should not count as assault. Has George Will ever been on the receiving end of unsolicited groping? I'm going to venture a guess: No.

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I don't tweet George Will's piece to get a rise out of anyone, or out of hatred. It is important to know that people like him are out there.

Another element that Will's indignant about is that "the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape." How about instead of skewering the woman for drinking and having sex, we teach men to know when a woman is too drunk to consent?

Being the victim of a campus sexual assault is not "a coveted status that confers privileges." It's having to stand in front of 12 lawyers for 20 hours of questioning, including how, exactly, you performed oral sex on someone or whether you consider yourself a "ho." It's being put on academic probation by an Ivy League university after your assault because they fear that you might be a mental health liability. And it's reading bullshit like this column and reliving your assault all over again.